Monday, October 26, 2015

EITI progress and countries' back-pedalling.

The Economist highlights this week the progress of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), to bring transparency and reduce corruption in the oil and other minerals industries across the world.

The article highlights some cases of "back-pedalling" in Africa, where countries find ways around the requirement of transparent accounting to siphon off money to corrupt individuals. Still, one could argue that the EITI exactly helps to highlight such behaviour.

Similarly, Azerbaijan which lost [eiti.org] its EITI compliant country status earlier this year, and was downgraded to candidate. The major concern here is the involvement of civil society. NRGI put out a press-release [resourcegovernance.org] condemning the beating of one of its advisory council board members, Ilgar Mammadov, by "high-ranking staff" of a prison where he's held since 2013.
Mr. Mammadov was arrested in in 2013 on charges of inciting mass violence in relation with an anti-government protest, and subsequently sentenced to 7 years in jail. The Council of Europe and European Court of Human Rights have ruled that the judgement was illegal and ordered his release [amnesty.org]. The government chose to ignore that ruling. The Council of Europe withdrew [azerireport.com, see also CoE website] from a working group it had initiated with Azerbaijan due to its suppression on human rights defenders in past years. Following the beating Mammadov's life is reportedly [azerireport.com] in danger now.